In 1983, the Reagan administration published A Nation at Risk, which warned the country about “a rising tide of mediocrity” in the nation’s K–12 schools. The report, authored by the US National Commission on Excellence in Education, kicked off almost forty years of educational reforms—most clearly embodied by President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top initiatives—which have been predicated on the idea of competition, primarily around raising standardized test scores.
It’s become apparent, however, that the tests students were asked to prepare for have been unworthy of their time. Results have remained stagnant, and students are experiencing ever-increasing levels of anxiety, depression, and suicide. Even reformers are now admitting that maybe they got some things wrong.8 Meanwhile, educational corporations like Pearson, which peddle both the standardized tests and the materials to prepare for them, have profited to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars.
The truth is that competition is a lousy framework for education. Requiring students to compete with each other for increasingly narrow pathways to success has indeed left lots of children behind. Even the winners are stressed out and demoralized, alienated from the pleasures of learning. By privileging operations, we’ve lost sight of education’s true mission. That’s just as true at colleges and universities as it is at K–12 schools. We should see the Reagan-era faiths and narratives for what they are—false and bankrupt programs that are literally bankrupting us.
CHAPTER 4
Competition Is Bad for Public Higher Education
With rankings comes competition, and in the current systems of higher education rankings, the only avenues by which colleges and universities can compete are prestige and amenities. Neither of those categories has anything to do with the underlying quality of education students get at the institution itself.
Believe it or not, the original incarnation of the US News Best College Ranking, which was released semiannually from 1983 to 1987, relied entirely on a peer reputation survey. Imagine a situation where your rating of a restaurant was based solely on what you had heard from others, rather than from any kind of firsthand experience. This is the exact kind of methodology that kicked off our college ranking obsession. Over the years, US News has tweaked its formula so that the peer reputation survey only accounts for 20 percent of the current rankings’ overall total, but the criteria they’ve added—graduation rates (35 percent); faculty resources (20 percent); financial resources (10 percent); student excellence, meaning high school class rank and test scores (10 percent); and alumni giving (5 percent)—overwhelmingly favor wealthy institutions that serve wealthy students. In 2020, nineteen of the top twenty institutions were private; UCLA came in at number twenty.
Prestige became a proxy for quality when in reality, it was just a marker for wealth.
But the narrative about the importance of prestige took hold inside institutions as well. Prestige could draw new students, which in turn could drive a school’s tuition revenue. And for the vast majority of public institutions, as state support has melted away year after year, that revenue has become the primary source of funding.
In 1960, 78 percent of the University of Michigan’s general fund budget came from the state, and just over 20 percent came from student tuition. Now, more than 75 percent of the budget comes from student tuition; 14 percent comes from the state.1 Because of these shifts, tuition increases have been outpacing inflation since the 1980s. But they were particularly pronounced in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession. Tuition in Louisiana, Arizona, Hawaii, and Georgia increased by over 75 percent between 2008 and 2017 as a direct result of declining state contributions. Forty-one states saw an increase in tuition of more than 20 percent over this same period.2 By the end of 2019, tuition accounted for 46 percent of all education revenue.3 This will almost certainly get worse during and after the pandemic.
Asking institutions that are financially strapped to compete as though they are wealthy requires them to burnish a “brand.” But when that brand isn’t supported by actual substance, we run into real problems.
Sending a Brand to Do an Institution’s Job
Donald Trump is what happens when you send a brand to do an institution’s job. His incompetent performance as president during a major national health crisis has validated the fact that he not only is not up to the job, but that he also has no interest in it. Rather than digging in to do the job of the president of the United States, he has instead spent the entirety of his presidency fluffing the Trump brand.
Now, when a college or university becomes a “brand,” it is not de facto a bad thing. When brands reflect an authentic underlying reality, when being good at the thing your organization does is good for the brand, brand and organization are a virtuous partnership. If it really was true, as Trump claimed about himself during the 2016 campaign, that “I alone can fix it,” and he actually did fix things, he would have become quite popular.
In the era before the US News rankings, colleges and universities were not so much brands as they were “types.” The elite were the elite. Flagship state universities were generally interchangeable. Regional publics were all “good schools.” There may have been slight differences in selectivity or the test scores of incoming students for similar types of institutions across states, but these reflected regional differences, not some inherent special quality of the institution itself.
But the US News rankings provided a blueprint by which institutions of the same type could improve their brand relative to the other schools in their close cohort. Institutions could also strive to move up in terms of their class. Unfortunately, the disconnect between the rankings’ criteria and what is actually good for the quality of education created a classic case of what is known as Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure.” Because the US News rankings are almost exclusively a measure of inputs, rather than outputs, influencing the rankings merely requires schools to figure out how to admit the kind of students who will bolster their ratings.
I saw this process take shape firsthand during my years as a non-tenure-track lecturer at Clemson University between 2005 and 2011. Upon assuming the Clemson presidency in 2001, James F. Barker declared a goal of moving the university from thirty-eighth place into the top twenty of US News’s public university rankings, a rather bold pronouncement given the low probability that other institutions would falter themselves. Clemson would have to leap over them. And as Catherine Watt, an institutional researcher at the university during this era, recounted, Clemson’s quest largely involved finding more and more creative ways to juke the stats.4
In order to boost faculty salaries, Clemson increased student tuition and started including the cost of benefits to the data they reported to US News. The school rejiggered accounting practices in order to report the most favorable financial information to the ranking board, even though that information was all on paper and ultimately meaningless to the university’s on-the-ground operations.
Since class sizes below twenty were a key element in the rankings, Clemson lowered the enrollments of as many twenty- and twenty-five-person classes as it could. But it simultaneously increased the enrollments of classes with fifty-five students